Near disaster

Monday would be our first day back at the Institute in quite a while. The weather is warm but  pleasant, not requiring much AC at home. In the morning, Dee had finished creating a contact group of the kids in our group (about 20 from all over Italy) for the YSA conference in Assisi next weekend. We will be the group leader for these kids, giving several devotionals and leading discussions at various times. She created a WhatsApp group and, even before she had time to send an initial welcome message, they were already chatting energetically with each other! I asked her to export those contacts for me to add to my Google contacts, since without names they just show up as phone numbers in WhatsApp. She quickly complied, and I imported the list she sent me. Mistake!!

She had inadvertently sent me her entire contact list, which is much bigger than mine and organized very differently (my way is better, of course!). All of a sudden my rather carefully managed contact list went from something I understood to a large mixture that I couldn't wrap my arms around. There was no easy way I could figure out to undo it, and every thing I tried at first seemed to make it worse. Fortunately, I had done an export/backup of my contacts only two weeks ago, so I ended up reverting to that and merging in my changes (that I could remember) since then. In such a situation you have to do things very carefully and deliberately so as not to lose anything. Anyway, after quite a while of groaning audibly (I would call it whimpering) about how bad it was, with Dee feeling awful about her mistake, I finally got my contact list back to where it belongs. We rely so much on Google for mail, contacts, calendar and directions that this really was a near catastrophe. I will back up my contacts more frequently from now on!

We left early to fill up the car and drop by Metro to buy some items for Taco Tuesday, mainly cheddar cheese and sour cream. I stayed in the car while Dee shopped, because we had all the boxes from Claudio's new desktop computer in the car. She got the stuff quickly, and we arrived downtown by about 12:30pm. 

Claudio took a while to arrive, and then we set to work on finishing his computer. I had ordered an extension cable for motherboard power for 7€ that we needed, and it worked fine. When we finally got everything installed and powered it on, absolutely nothing happened: no fan, no display, no nothing. Turns out that we had connected the power cables incorrectly, and after that the fans at least came on, along with the fun LED lighting that are a feature of the case he bought. However, absolutely nothing showed up on the screen. We tried different things: re-seating the RAM, removing the graphics card, removing the hard drive, all to no avail. 

It was that point in a PC build where you think you just wasted all your money -- happens most of the time, but this one lasted well over an hour and was excruciating. Finally, I re-seated one of the power connections and everything worked. Whew! We ran some quick tests, then installed Windows from a USB drive I had prepared. Claudio choose an AMD Ryzen 7 CPU (8 cores, 16 threads) with 16GB of memory, a nice graphics card and a 500GB SSD, so it is fast! He still has some software installation and configuration to do, but it looks really good now. As we loaded it all into his car to take home, he gave me a big hug. 😀

During the afternoon, we learned via email that our Institute campus has been approved as a Family History Center. This was awesome news, something that we have been asking for for some time. Our friend and former FH manager in Salt Lake knew what buttons to push to get this approved. There are many records in Italy that are not available online except at an official FH center, so this will allow Dee (and me) to help the kids more easily with their family history. We still have to figure out what computer to use and where to locate it, since we don't have much free space here, but we and Ugo are excited. I can't express how great this is! I hit that restriction all the time working with Italians.

Dee spent almost all afternoon in the kitchen, cooking various desserts for FHE. She burned the first one -- a granola mix -- but the other two kinds of cookies turned out great. I offered to teach the lesson for her, using my lesson on Proverbs from the day before as a template, and she happily accepted. Usually she won't let me do that for her, even though she knows how much I love to teach, because she likes it too, but with all the stuff going on this coming week she relented.

My lesson went  well, with lots of good participation. Doug is such a great teacher. The young people ate it up. Everyone, including our non-members Margie and Junior, took a turn finding and sharing a good proverb, with a very nice spirit present. Afterwards we enjoyed my wife's cookies, followed by a spirited card game.  And it was wonderful to see our GANS again!

 

  

 

For August (much of Italy is still on vacation), it was a fairly big group. After the festivities, we took the sisters, Neuberger and Decker, home to their apartment below us. They were the two who did a heart attack on our door the day before and were at the Institute all evening working on their presentation with our ZLs for next week's Zone Conference. It was a big help for us because we had a bunch of stuff, so they helped carry bags in exchange for a ride home.

We got to meet Elder Baker, a new zone leader in Roma 1.He's American, but he has the best Italian accent I have ever heard among these missionaries. He's very personable and a great addition to the mission. They were working on zone conference preparation. The zone leaders and sister training leaders prepare a good chunk of the meeting. They're creative and do interactive things. Impressive.

We were happy to hear that Margie has finished her internship and they even offered her a job! Her thesis is due September 3, so she's down to the wire. She is talented, diligent, pleasant and beautiful. She would be a benefit to any company.

I put together the new shelving for the bathroom storage area and cleaned everything up. It's so much better than it was, and now the organization is logical and easy to maintain.

For our YSA conference, we have a list in an excel spreadsheet. Unfortuately, it had some random merged cells and wasn't sortable. I spent a couple of hours getting it into shape, only to find out there was a cleaned up copy that hadn't been sent to us. Oh well, it's taken care of now. There are 130 kids going to the conference, and 19 will be in our own little group. They're from all over Italy. It will be fun to get to know them all and play and learn together.